Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Seasons Greetings!This holiday season you can give your friends and family the gift that keeps on giving. You can help them deck the halls of congress with colorful impeachment petitions! Impeach for Peace has created holiday impeachment cards that allow your friends and family to initiate the impeachment process. Impeach for Peace created the Holiday Impeachment image, and researched a company that will allow you to send jumbo sized postcards along with a personalized message using your web browser. The first card you send is free! The cost of sending additional holiday greetings ranges from $1.11 to $1.87/card depending on how many you send. (Impeach for Peace receives no funds from these holiday greetings.)

As Congress gears up to debate giving amnesty to telecoms involved in illegal spying, the terrific Frontline documentary "Spying on the Home Front" will be rebroadcast Tuesday on many PBS stations across the country. This program examines just how far the government has gone with its surveillance program, and features EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn discussing EFF's ongoing case against AT&T for its illegal collaboration with the NSA. AT&T whisleblower Mark Klein also tells his compelling story about his discovery of a "secret room" diverting AT&T network traffic to the NSA.

But our case is only part of the story. As Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald put it, the documentary "powerfully dramatizes the severity of privacy erosion at the hands of a federal government operating largely in the dark."

Check your local listings for times, or you can always watch the program on the Frontline website. Then tell lawmakers to stop the spying and to block amnesty for telecoms that broke the law.

In her latest article in the Indypendent, Jessica Lee highlighted the role of the RAND Corporation in drafting the the “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act.” Writes Lee:

The bill appears to be influenced by the government-affiliated RAND Corporation, whose website includes a letter from Harman noting, “RAND … and I have worked closely for many years.” Harman, who chairs the House Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing and Terrorism Risk Assessment, introduced H.R. 1955 on April 19, 2007.

Two weeks prior to this, Brian Michael Jenkins of RAND delivered testimony on “Jihadist Radicalization and Recruitment” to Harman’s subcommittee. Jenkins claimed “radicalization and recruiting are taking place in the United States,” and listed a number of high-profile cases in which Muslim Americans have been arrested on terrorism-related charges.

But RAND does more than just push thought-crime legislation through Congress. Indeed, a report released today by the City of New York shows just how long the reach of the RAND Corporation is. According to the New York Times:

Whites and members of minorities have a roughly equal chance of being stopped by police officers and questioned on the street in New York City. But officers are more likely to frisk, search, arrest or give summonses to black or Hispanic people — or to use force against them — according to a study released yesterday.

The study [was commissioned] by the Rand Corporation in March after it was revealed that the police stopped 508,540 people on the street last year.

Most importantly, the study “found no evidence of racial profiling,” writes the New York Sun:

A long-awaited independent review of half a million reports by the New York Police Department of stop, question, and frisk encounters with civilians was hailed yesterday by police officials, who said the review found no pattern of racial profiling.

The study, by the Rand Corp. of Santa Monica, Calif., found that black pedestrians were stopped by police “at a rate that is 20 to 30% lower than their representation in crime-suspect descriptions.

Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, called the report “hugely flawed,” saying that the document was more striking for what it did not say than for what it said. She said the report relied on “inappropriate benchmarks” to reach its findings.

Shock of shocks: another dodgy government report from the RAND Corp. This time, in our own backyard.

A local and national coalition of impeachment activists is planning to stage various protests and demonstrations throughout the Rose Bowl Parade in Pasadena, California, on New Year's Day. The convergence of groups is called the White Rose Coalition in honor of the resistance movement that emerged in Munich Germany in 1942. It includes members of the Los Angeles National Impeachment Center (LANIC), Code Pink, World Can't Wait, ANSWER, Progressive Democrats of America, the Green Party, Veterans for Peace, United for Peace and Justice, and others They are calling for impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, based upon Articles of Impeachment which pertain to what they call "high crimes and misdemeanors." The groups are staging this protest because "this administration is said to be planning yet another illegal invasion, this time bombing Iran," according to Cynthia Mather, a spokesperson from LANIC. "The consequences of such an assault on global well-being and security would be catastrophic," she said. "The Democrats are not making any move to stop it, so impeachment is our only recourse."

Numbers of protestors and demonstrators from the various groups could be in the hundreds or, possibly, in the thousands, says Peter Thottam, Executive Director of LANIC. "We expect this to be a national day of impeachment visibility, with folks joining from all parts of the country. It is hard to gauge how many will show up, but according to the latest MSNBC poll, when 584,000 people were asked if they thought Bush had committed impeachable offenses, 89 per cent said yes! There is a tremendous level of anger and frustration out there. I doubt if our Washington, D.C. politicians have any idea just how much. Bush and Cheney are shredding our Constitution. Our Congress is obligated to act now before it is too late."

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Roots

Revelation 13

And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy...

...And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him?...

Mark 13

And when ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars, be ye not troubled: for such things must needs be; but the end shall not be yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be earthquakes in divers places, and there shall be famines and troubles: these are the beginnings of sorrows.